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Category: Government

A government can break the social contract in several ways. It can interfere with the process by which the people choose the laws by which they are governed. It can violate those laws itself. It can exploit the people by extracting wealth from them in excess of its needs and enriching insiders. It can fail to protect its population.

By dropping all pretense of ruling for the common good; by presuming that they embody the law (Laws-R-us); by instituting various kinds of boycotts (institutions-R-us); by using the strongest, most motivating language toward opponents; by inciting all manner of violence; by death-gripping their privileges; by using their positions’ powers in government and social institutions at or beyond their extreme edge; the people who occupy the government’s and society’s institutions continue to remove whatever deference the institutions (by the authority of which they rule) had inspired. They increasingly stand before their opponents, naked. By daring their opponents to capture these positions in any way possible, and to use them in the same way, they threw down a gantlet that is now being picked up.

In short, the “resistance” has begun to radicalize middle America. It redoubled millions of Americans’ sense of siege, their fear of unbridled rule by unaccountable powers, of being accused of “hate speech,” of normal life made impossible by Progressive socio-political demands. It confirmed the sense that Donald Trump and such as he, whatever their faults, are all that stands between themselves and having an alien way of life imposed upon them.

The voters who, over four election cycles, stripped the Democratic Party of the U.S. Presidency, left it in the minority in both Houses of Congress, without Governors in two-thirds of the States, and in the minority in two-thirds of the state legislatures did so not out of love for the Republican Party. They were being insulted and made to feel strangers in their own country, and wanted that to stop. But elections did not stop the ruling class’s assaults on their supposed inferiors. Instead, the “resistance” increased pressures on them. Political correctness is more virulent than ever, speech is more restricted than ever. Being on the wrong side of the right people is more dangerous than ever.

The cultural Marxists believe that someday they will be the sole holders of power and be able to dictate to the masses how to live and what to think. Yet the neo-Marxist intellectuals are in for a surprise. When socialism should come, indeed, the “dictatorship of the intellectuals” will be anything but benign—and not much different from what happened after the Soviets took power. The intellectuals will be among the victims. This was, after all, the way it happened in the French Revolution, which was the first attempt at a revolution by intellectuals. Many of the victims of the guillotine were prominent intellectuals who had earlier supported the revolution—Robespierre among them.

Now, when a judge the Left doesn’t like is, in Brett Kavanaugh, seated on the high bench, the complaining starts about how the senators who confirmed him didn’t represent a majority of the voters. “It’s not about Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior. It’s about justices who do not represent the will of the majority,” says a column in the Times by no less a figure than Michael Tomasky.

That, of course, would be like complaining that the justices do not, say, take in home sewing. It’s not their job to take in home sewing. Their job is decide actual cases and controversies. Nor is it the job of the senators to represent the will of the majority. That is the job of the Representative House, the only house whose seats are apportioned by population. The job of the Senators is to represent the states.

That’s the Senate’s very purpose. The Left likes to suggest that the only reason for this was to protect slavery. Yet even the original Constitution anticipated an end to slavery. It still made the equal representation of the states in the Senate the only feature of the parchment that could never be amended absent the consent of the state being denied equal representation.

I blame the 17th Amendment. The Senate is no longer chosen by the State governments but by the people, same as the House. In effect we have two Houses of Representatives. The State governments are unrepresented.

Do you really think that a Senate that represented the States would vote unfunded mandates on their States?

There’s a level of anger far deeper and more consequential than expressed rage or visible behavior, it’s called Cold Anger.

Cold Anger does not need to go to violence. For those who carry it, no conversation is needed when we meet. You cannot poll or measure it; specifically because most who carry it avoid discussion… And that decision has nothing whatsoever to do with any form of correctness.

We watched the passage of Obamacare at 1:38am on the day before Christmas Eve in 2009. We watched the Senate, then the House attempt passing Amnesty in 2014. We know exactly how it passed, and we know exactly why it passed. We don’t need to stand around talking about it….

Here you have Harvard brokering a “collusion,” literally, between spies and the people studying religions that people don’t like. If you think by “dissident religions” the Harvard pontiffs refer to Islam, you are probably not paying close enough attention. The new Branch Davidians, at least in the mind of people engineering this modern-day Inquisition, are probably Christian sects that disagree with Democrats and might defy Democrat-led governments.

In order to defray the possibility of conflict, Barack Obama’s old alma mater has gathered together “religion scholars” whose field research involves spying on the religious opposition to the Democrats and feeding information to the FBI. You do not have to go far to connect the dots from here to the media, either.